The controls behind the studio: who can manage it, how to open it to everyone, how to tune the AI that writes your courses, and a text coach that answers only from your knowledge.
Access & setup
Cortex is an admin studio. Getting in takes one permission and one nav click.
Cortex requires the cortex.manage permission. It is granted to the admin and super_admin roles by default, so most admins already have it. Anyone without it who tries to open Cortex is sent to /unauthorized.
1
Grant the permission (optional)
To let another role manage Cortex, go to Admin → Roles and enable cortex.manage (it lives under the cortex category). Skip this if you are already an admin or super_admin.
2
Open Cortex
In the left admin nav, click Cortex (the BrainCircuit icon). This opens /admin-panel/cortex.
3
Find your way around
Every Cortex screen shares the same five-tab sub-nav: Courses, Knowledge, Compose, Coach, and Prompts. This page covers the two admin-facing tabs — Prompts and Coach.
The Cortex admin home, with the five-tab sub-nav (Courses, Knowledge, Compose, Coach, Prompts) that appears on every screen.
Making Cortex visible
By default only admins can see Cortex. Flip one switch to open it to everyone.
Cortex ships as a draft app, which means it is visible to admins only and stays off the public home grid. When you are ready to launch it to all users, publish it from the app registry.
1
Open the app registry
Go to /admin-panel/apps.
2
Flip Cortex to live
Change Cortex from draft to live. It now appears on the home grid for everyone.
Launch when you have something to show
Keep Cortex in draft while you build and review your first courses. Flip it to live only once at least one course is polished and ready for learners.
Editable AI prompts
Every AI step in Cortex runs on a prompt you can read and rewrite — no code required.
Open /admin-panel/cortex/prompts (the Prompts tab). Each AI step in the studio — distill, suggest-systems, suggest-pedagogy, outline, rewrite, item, expand-activity, and coach — has its own editable prompt card.
Each AI step has a prompt card: its name, key, a customized badge if overridden, a description, and clickable placeholder chips above the editable text.
Every card shows:
Name & key
The human name plus its key (shown as a code chip) so you always know which step you are tuning.
customized · vN badge
Appears only when the prompt has been overridden, telling you it no longer matches the shipped default.
Description
A short note on what this step does and when it runs.
Placeholder chips
Clickable {{placeholder}} chips — the variables Cortex fills in at run time (your knowledge, the topic, and so on). Click one to insert it into the prompt.
1
Edit a prompt
Change the wording in the card’s textarea, then Save. When it reads Saved, your change takes effect immediately — it becomes a database override of the shipped default for that step.
2
Reset to default
If a card shows the customized badge, click Reset to discard your override and restore the original shipped prompt.
Prompts change what the AI produces
Editing a prompt affects every future run of that step across all authors. Change one thing at a time, then re-run a small compose to confirm the result still reads well before relying on it.
The grounded text coach
A chat that answers strictly from a chosen knowledge system — and admits when a question falls outside it.
Open /admin-panel/cortex/coach (the Coach tab) for a two-pane chat. It is the fastest way to interrogate your own knowledge and sanity-check what a course will be able to teach.
The grounded text coach: pick which knowledge to ground in on the left, then ask questions and get answers with citation chips.
1
Choose what to ground in
In the left pane, under Ground new chat in:, click the system chips to pick which knowledge the coach may draw from.
2
Start a chat
Click New chat (it shows a count of the selected systems). Your threads are listed below for you to return to.
3
Ask a question
The chat header shows Grounded in: … and a read-aloud toggle. Type your question — Enter to send, Shift+Enter for a newline — or dictate it with the mic, then Send.
4
Read the grounded answer
The answer streams in with citation chips — each is a [n] plus the nano-lesson title it came from, so you can trace every claim back to source.
It only knows what you taught it
The coach answers only from the knowledge you grounded it in, and says so honestly when a question is outside that knowledge. If it declines to answer, that is a signal your knowledge base is missing a nano-lesson — not a bug.
